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Physician, heal thysef: what happens when a neurosurgeon who's treated hundreds of patients with malignant brain tumors gets one himself?

Article Excerpt
Sam Hassenbusch had been having headaches. They weren't severe--he could knock down the pain with Tylenol--but they kept coming back. He mentioned them to his wife, Rhonda, who thought maybe he'd been pushing himself too hard. At 51, Sam was full of energy, and his career was peaking. He was a senior neurosurgeon at the University of Texas's M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, and an internationally renowned specialist in pain research and management. In 33 years of marriage, Rhonda had seen her husband take time off only once--a few hours on the day he had had his wisdom teeth removed. His weeks were a nonstop swirl of intricate brain surgeries, patient consultations, procedures to treat cancer and chronic pain, and lectures throughout the country and abroad. He was president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine and one of M. D. Anderson's resident experts at applying the regulatory and insurance codes that made sure doctors and institutions got paid. A soft-spoken man whose beard veils boyish dimples, Sam came to work with cowboy boots under his scrubs and habitually ate two McDonald's cheeseburgers, medium fries, a hot apple pie, and a chocolate shake for lunch. His idea of recreation was to turn a three-mile commute in the snarl of Houston traffic into a fifty-mile cruise on his Victory Vegas motorcycle. The headaches were probably a symptom of stress, Rhonda speculated, but why not just get them checked out. Sam asked a neighbor who is a radiologist to schedule an MRI, and on May 10, 2005, he and Rhonda went to get the results.

"You can't imagine how many times in how few seconds you can check to see if maybe, somehow, they attached the wrong name to a film," Sam recalls. He likened the shape of the tumor they saw on the screen to a small banana or a hot dog. "The radiologist looked at it and told me, 'Yeah, you're right.' Rhonda was terribly upset, of course, but unlike her, I knew exactly what that tumor meant. A three percent chance of five years' survival."

The neurosurgeon had glioblastoma multiforme, the most common kind of malignant brain tumor that originates in the brain and one of the most aggressive of all human cancers. Glioblastoma is so lethal because even if surgery and radiation appear to have removed the tumor, it may still have spread through the brain in tentacles, every microscopic cell on a different tear of destruction, all of them running amok. Glioblastoma claims the lives of about l0,000 Americans a year. Sam had treated about 500 brain cancer patients in the course of his career, and he had performed more than 150 surgeries to remove glioblastoma tumors. Whenever he had to break the news to patients that they had the cancer, he'd try to be upbeat about chemotherapy protocols and ongoing research, but he knew that glioblastoma typically kills half its victims within 52 weeks. With no hint of a cure, little progress had been made...

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